when did TOS take place, 23rd century or 22nd century

[johnnybear]

The reasoning behind Kirk's second visit to the barrier without any crew being affected is due to the story not wanting that basically, or you could just say that the ship had received extra shielding by the time of it's next encounter with the negative energy barrier!
JB

 

[Ssosmcin]

The reasoning behind Kirk's second visit to the barrier without any crew being affected is due to the story not wanting that basically, or you could just say that the ship had received extra shielding by the time of it's next encounter with the negative energy barrier!
JB

The Kelvan’s no doubt enhanced their shielding. “Modifications are underway.” That’s all I needed to know.

 

[MAGolding]

Short Answer:

There is an official date for TOS as well as official dates for some other Star Trek movies, television shows, and other productions.

According to that official chronology, Kirk is promoted to captain of the Enterprise in AD 2263, "where No Man Has Gone Before" happens in 2265, kirk's five year mission begins in AD 1164, season 1 of TOS happens in AD 2266 to 2268, season 2 of TOS happens in AD 2267 to 2268, season 3 of TOS happens in AD 2268 to 2269, and Kirk's five year mission ends in AD 2269.

Thus the official chronology puts TOS in the 23rd century from AD 2201 to 2300.

Long Answer:

The official chronology is not stated in canon, and thus is not canonical. Thus if could be either correct or incorrect.

The official chronology is largely based on assumptions about when various Star Trek productions happen, instead of deducing from evidence in those productions possible date ranges for those productions. Thus it is alway s possiblity that a close examination of the evidence will prove that some Star Trek productions cannot prossibly hppen when the official chronology says that they happen.

Those assumptions include:

The seasons of TOS happen during the overlapping years which are exactly 300 years after those seasons were brrroadcast in th e USA. Thus each TOS episode must happen 299 or 300 years after first being broadcast in the USA.

and:

Episodes of TNG happen with seasons filling Earth calendar years, with the first season of TNG happein gn 2364 exactly 400 years after the first TOS pilot was produced, the second season happening in 2365, the third in 2366, and so on.

And:

Time intervals expressed as X centuries are exactly X hundred years, no more, no less.

And:

Dates are given in the Gregorian Calendar and use Anno Domini dating and not any other calendar eras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_era#:~:text=A calendar era is the period of time,Ethiopian Orthodox churches have their own Christian eras).

I note that in all of TOS, TAS, TOS and TNG movies, and episodes of TNH, DS9, and VOY, there are hundreds of dates given, and only about half a dozen are specified as AD or BC. All other dates are totally unspecified and might be dates using other calendar eras.

And I have found considerable evidence for the use of dates given in different calendar eras in various Star Trek productions.

And other assumptions:.

How correct are those assumptions?

In "Wolf in the Fold":

KIRK: Computer. Criminological files. Cases of unsolved mass murders of women since Jack the Ripper.
COMPUTER: Working. 1932. Shanghai, China, Earth. Seven women knifed to death. 1974, Kiev, USSR, Earth. Five women knifed to death. 2105. Martian colonies. Eight women knifed to death. 2156. Heliopolis, Alpha Eridani Two. Ten women knifed to death. There are additional examples.

So TOS would have to happen in or after AD 2156 if all the assumptions are correct.

In "Where No Man Has Gone Before":

DEHNER: Page three eighty seven.
MITCHELL: My love has wings. Slender, feathered things with grace in upswept curve and tapered tip. The Nightingale Woman, written by Phineas Tarbolde on the Canopius planet back in 1996. It's funny you picked that one, Doctor.
DEHNER: Why?
MITCHELL: That's one of the most passionate love sonnets of the past couple of centuries. How do you feel, Doctor?

In my opinion, Mitchell would only describe 1996 as being in the past couple of centuries if it was between one and two centuries earlier. Thus the date of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" should be between 2096 and 2196 of the calendar used.

So those two episodes date TOS to sometime between AD 2156 and AD 2196 according to some of the assumptions made in the official Star Trek Chronlogy: The History of the Future. But that same chronology has "Where No Man Has Gone Before" happen in AD 2265.

According to the official chronology, "The Savage Curatain" happens in 2269 and they meet what apears to be Abraham LIncoln (1809-1865).

SCOTT: Lincoln died three centuries ago on a planet hundreds of light years away.
SPOCK: More that direction, Engineer.

So Spock seems to correct Scott about the currect direction to Earth, but doesn't correct Scott's statement about Abraham Lincoln dying 300 years ago.

According to the assumption that three centuries equals exactly 300 years, Abraham Lincoln would die in 1969, which is 160 years since he was born, and thus obviously had science ficitonal adventures different from his life in our timeline.

If Star Trek is in an alternate universe where Abraham Lincoln improbably, but within the limits of possibility, lived to be 100 and died in 1909, Scott's statement that was three centuries ago" combined with the assumption that three centuries equals 300 years would force "The Savage Curtain" to happen in 2209 instead of 2269.

If the assumption that "three centuries" always equals exactly 300 years is abandoned, it would be possible for Abraham Lincoln to die in 1865 and "The savage Curtain" happen in 2269, if Scott was speaking loosely and vaguely enough.

I can image that Spock might make allowances for human imprecision and not correct a statement of X centuries if the actual time span was between X minus one centuries and X plus one centuries. Thus Spock woud not correct Scot about the time span if "The Savage Curtain happened between 2065 and 2265.

But the official date for "The Savage Curtain" is 2269, which is 404 years after Lincoln died in 1865. And I find it hard to believe that Spock would resist correcting Scott's "three centuries" if the actual time span was less than 200 years or more than 400 years.

So I find it very hard to believe that TOS happens in the years assigned to it by the offiicial chronology.

Thus a fictional universe which includes TOS, TAS, and the TOS films, can have TOS happen in the 22nd century or earlier in the 23rd century than the offficial chronology puts it.

But considering the many date references in TNG, DS9, and VOY which were written to agree with the official Chronology, a ficitonal universe which includes both TOS and the TNG era productions will be bound by the evidence for the time period of TNG, DS9, and VOY and for the time intervals between them and TOS and TOS era movies. Thus TOS should still happen years or decades before its official chronology date, but the connection to the TNG era productions would probably strongly limit how much earlier it could be, and probably prevent TOS from happening as early as the 22nd century AD.

 

[johnnybear]

Mr.Scott was an engineer not an historian as Dr.McCoy might have said! How many people today could tell how long ago Marie Curie died or Alexander Fleming? Or even knowledge of a popular leader of the recent past (rare as that maybe) say a few hundred years in the future!!! Admitted that information was at hand on any computer terminal but Scotty would more than likely be reading up on schematics for a new engine system than a long dead President!
The real reason of course was that no one knew how far in the future the show should be set and most writers believed we'd be out in space by the turn of the century anyway!
JB

 

[Tenacity]

Add in that Scott wasn't an American, he was Scottish. His knowledge of general American history could reasonable be slim to none. While his knowledge of Scottish history could be better.

 

[cooleddie74]

Scotty was just rounding off the way an American might say that William the Conqueror was 1,000 years ago when in reality it hasn't yet been a full thousand years since his reign.

 

[Ssosmcin]

Star Trek took place "in the future." Somewhere between the 22nd and 28th centuries.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea took place between 1972 and 1983.

The Fugitive fudged with dates a lot too.

The 60's "one and done" style of TV shows...

 

[Shawnster]

I either say the US has existed for 200 or 300 or nearly 300 years or just over 200 years. I never or rarely say the US has been around for 244 years.

 

[MAGolding]

Mr.Scott was an engineer not an historian as Dr.McCoy might have said! How many people today could tell how long ago Marie Curie died or Alexander Fleming? Or even knowledge of a popular leader of the recent past (rare as that maybe) say a few hundred years in the future!!! Admitted that information was at hand on any computer terminal but Scotty would more than likely be reading up on schematics for a new engine system than a long dead President!
The real reason of course was that no one knew how far in the future the show should be set and most writers believed we'd be out in space by the turn of the century anyway!
JB

Add in that Scott wasn't an American, he was Scottish. His knowledge of general American history could reasonable be slim to none. While his knowledge of Scottish history could be better.

Scotty was just rounding off the way an American might say that William the Conqueror was 1,000 years ago when in reality it hasn't yet been a full thousand years since his reign.

I either say the US has existed for 200 or 300 or nearly 300 years or just over 200 years. I never or rarely say the US has been around for 244 years.

What you are forgetting it is that ficitonal characters don't talk exactly like most real people talk. Some fictional characters sometimes talk more like most real people talk, some sometimes talk less. But all fictional characters generally have to talk in a more interesting way that most real people talk.

And when putting a story in a setting unfamiliar to the intended audience.writers have to give only accurate information about that unfamiliar setting. Especially in science fiction set in the future, where audience members can't look up facts about that fictional future setting the way they could look up facts about the real world.

The audience's only source of information about the fictional setting in a science fiction story is the story itself. So every detail about that setting revealed in the story has to be literally true within the possible range of meanings of the words it is expressed in.

And that includes the statements made by characters, who thus have to be more precise and accurate than most real people are.

The only exception to all the information in a story being literally true is when something in accurate is said by someone who is lyin gor mistaken, and the fact that it is inaccurate becomes important later in the story.

So writers can have characters express inaccurate nformation about their setting, if that inaccuracy is an important plot point later revealed in the story. Since there is no such reveal in "The Savage Curtain", Scott's "three centuries" must be accurate enough for Spock to refrain from correcting Scott, and so the date of "The Savage Curtain" should be sometime between AD 2065 and AD 2265.

Star Trek took place "in the future." Somewhere between the 22nd and 28th centuries.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea took place between 1972 and 1983.

The Fugitive fudged with dates a lot too.

The 60's "one and done" style of TV shows...

It matters not what the creators desire to create, but what they actually succeed in creating. The creators of TOS may have intended and hoped to keep the possible date range of TOS vague and spread out over six centuries, but "The Savage Curtain" narrows down the latest possible date for the third season of TOS to 2265.

 

[Lt. Tyler]

Add in that Scott wasn't an American, he was Scottish. His knowledge of general American history could reasonable be slim to none. While his knowledge of Scottish history could be better.

Ohh please lol

 

[Christopher]

And when putting a story in a setting unfamiliar to the intended audience.writers have to give only accurate information about that unfamiliar setting. Especially in science fiction set in the future, where audience members can't look up facts about that fictional future setting the way they could look up facts about the real world.

This is basically correct, but...

And that includes the statements made by characters, who thus have to be more precise and accurate than most real people are.

Here you're making the mistake of confusing accuracy and precision. They are not the same thing and they do not necessarily align. Accuracy means the answer is correct; precision means the answer is exact. If you say the value of pi is between 3 and 4, that is accurate but not at all precise. If you say the value of pi is exactly 4.000000000001, that is extremely precise but completely inaccurate.

So if a character says an event happened 200 years ago, that could still be accurate if the event happened 189 or 227 years before, because it is understood by any reasonable observer that people round off numbers in casual conversation. The "about" is implicit. It is imprecise, but accuracy does not require precision.

More importantly, while it's true that character dialogue is meant to give exposition, it is not meant to give more exposition than the audience needs. Plot-relevant details need to be included, but unimportant details should not be. The audience needs to know if an event happened around two centuries ago. That gives them a sufficient sense of the magnitude of the gap, and that's usually going to be the important thing to know. But the precise number of years, whether it was exactly 200 years or 213 years, is probably not going to matter to the story, so it should not be included in the story. If it happened exactly 213 years ago, that's too much detail for story purposes, so it would get rounded to 200 in dialogue.

By the same token, if the only information the audience really needs to know is that something happened a very long time ago, then it doesn't matter narratively if it was three centuries or four centuries. It's a mistake to assume every detail in a narrative is equally important. Details like numbers are often just placeholders that can be changed at a whim without affecting the story. So it doesn't matter if they're mathematically accurate or not, because that's not what the story is about. It doesn't matter to "The Savage Curtain" how long ago Lincoln died, only that it was long enough in the past for Scott to reject the idea that he's coming aboard the Enterprise.

 

[Hofner]

Star Trek took place "in the future." Somewhere between the 22nd and 28th centuries.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea took place between 1972 and 1983.

The Fugitive fudged with dates a lot too.

The 60's "one and done" style of TV shows...

If I remember right, the show "Daniel Boone" ranged from the Revolutionary War to at least the early 1800s if not the war of 1812.

Robert

 

[Ssosmcin]

If I remember right, the show "Daniel Boone" ranged from the Revolutionary War to at least the early 1800s if not the war of 1812.

Robert

Right? Don’t get me started on The Untouchables....

 

[Christopher]

If I remember right, the show "Daniel Boone" ranged from the Revolutionary War to at least the early 1800s if not the war of 1812.

Filmation's animated Lone Ranger in 1980-81 strove to be educational about American history, having the Ranger and Tonto get involved with plenty of historical figures and events, but those events spanned nearly three decades, from the Pony Express c.1860 to the Oklahoma land rush of 1889.

 

[Hofner]

Correcting my previous post, the show Daniel Boone took place before, during, and after the American Revolution. But according to the wikipedia article on the show, one episode was about some incident in 1806.

So the show ranged thirty years or so but did not extend to the War of 1812.

Robert

 

[Christopher]

Correcting my previous post, the show Daniel Boone took place before, during, and after the American Revolution. But according to the wikipedia article on the show, one episode was about some incident in 1806.

Of course, that's got nothing on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, which between them established Helen of Troy (c. 12th century BCE), Julius Caesar (first century BCE), and Vlad the Impaler (15th century CE) as contemporaries.

 

[MAGolding]

If I remember right, the show "Daniel Boone" ranged from the Revolutionary War to at least the early 1800s if not the war of 1812.

Robert

Correcting my previous post, the show Daniel Boone took place before, during, and after the American Revolution. But according to the wikipedia article on the show, one episode was about some incident in 1806.

So the show ranged thirty years or so but did not extend to the War of 1812.

Robert

I didn't watch a lot of Daniel Boone episodes. But I got the impression that episodes set before the Revolution, during the Revolution, and after the Revolution were broadcast more or less randomly.

I wonder if anyone knows enough about that series to tell me whether that impression is correct.

Examples of the chronology of some other television series can be seen at:

https://moviechat.org/tt0046647/Sto...6a618c8b/Chronology-of-Stories-of-the-Century

https://moviechat.org/tt0050066/Tal...376a618be4/Chronology-of-Tales-of-Wells-Fargo

https://moviechat.org/tt0050037/Maverick/5c943dd3be89fc07f659a340/Some-Maverick-Chronology

The examples of thsoe shows lead me to think that it is not certain that TOS episodes wee intended to happen in the order that they were filmed or broadcast.

 

[Hofner]

I'm pretty sure "Daniel Boone" jumped around timewise. For example, wikipedia (Yes, I know not always accurate), says that the 1806 ep was in the 2nd season while another ep in that season took place before the Revolution. So yeah, the 2nd season spanned more than 30 years.

Although not nearly as bad, I seem to remember "The Fugitive" would jump around timewise too. Like say in the first season, the narrater would say Kimble has been running six months and then in a later episode he's been running four months.

Little aside on "The Fugitive" from what I read, network execs were planning to end the show with no resolution. Evidently, it never occured to them that anyone would care enough about a tv show to need a resolution.

Hah, they should have revived the show as "Again, The Fugitive" where he remarries, finds his second wife murdered and is once again wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. No one believes his story that just before finding his murdered second wife's body, he saw a one legged man clomping on his pegleg from the vicinity of his home. I mean, how likely is it that his wives keep getting murdered by men with missing limbs?

Back to TOS, although they did make the stardates more or less sequential, they would have the Enterprise jumping between locations and functions from episode to episode. For example, charting unknown space in "Corbomite" and then patrolling known space lanes and arresting Harry Mudd a short time later.

One episode that stands out to me is "Return To Tomorrow". The Enterprise is as Spock puts it, hundreds of light years beyond where any Earth ship has gone. Then in the next episode, they're suddenly back in known space again.

Robert

 

[Nerys Myk]

I sticking with "All of the above".

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Of course, that's got nothing on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, which between them established Helen of Troy (c. 12th century BCE), Julius Caesar (first century BCE), and Vlad the Impaler (15th century CE) as contemporaries.

The Jack of All Trades series with Bruce Campbell was a similar Anachronism Stew, to use TV Tropes' term for it. The series took place in 1801, but they frequently had historical figures pop up on the show that were dead by that date, like Benjamin Franklin (died 1790) and Catherine the Great (died 1796).